Don’t be fooled by Dow’s warm
and fuzzy propaganda: its lust for profit can been measured
in the cancers, deformations, lost lives and ruined dreams its products
have caused. How many Bhopals has this company created? Read more
about them below.

Dow was one of the principal manufacturers of Agent
Orange, an herbicide used by the US military to deprive the
Vietnamese resistance of forest cover and food crops. Nearly 21
million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over Vietnam during
the war, (1) and in concentrations far more
intense than anything allowed in the United States. (2)
Although Agent Orange is itself a poison, the formulation dumped
over Vietnam was also severely contaminated with dioxin –
one of the most toxic chemicals ever studied. Dow and other suppliers
were aware of the contamination, but kept it secret from the US
Government. (3) While a miniscule amount
of dioxin is enough to cause serious health effects in humans, we
now know that the US military dumped the equivalent of 600 kilograms
of pure dioxin over Vietnam. (4)

Before...

...Agent Orange...

...and after

The result was predictable, and devastating. Entire regions of
Vietnam remain so highly contaminated that children--an estimated
500,000 thus far--are being born with serious congenital deformities
to this day (read more in The
Guardian). A path-breaking 2003 study by Columbia University
estimates that “at least 2.1 million but perhaps as many as
4.8 million people would have been present during the spraying.”
(5) A 2002 study by The Journal of Occupational
and Environmental Medicine found elevated levels of TCDD (the
most toxic chemical in the dioxin family) in 95% of blood samples
taken from residents living in Bien Hoa City, more than 30 years
after spraying was stopped. (6)

Meanwhile, a petition to the US Government seeking justice for
the victims of Agent Orange, initiated by the Britain-Vietnam Friendship
Society, has already collected nearly 700,000 signatures from around
the world. You can add yours here.

I
would sit high up on a hill, just high enough so that I could
relish the splendid beauty that was Vietnam. I never saw the
danger. There were real people out there, worshiping the land
they lived on. It was so beautiful. So many colors of green.
The fern trees were primeval. The small mountains were just
covered by that green. The planes would circle back and forth,
brushing and spraying the troops, the foliage, the water supply,
everything. They called themselves the Ranch Hands. Ironic.
They grow things on a ranch. But not these guys. They would
spray and spray and spray, until they had destroyed all the
beauty it took nature a lifetime to build; until there was
nothing left but little scrubby bushes, and tail trees like
bony fingers pointing up to the sky, and a gray-brown residue
of what once was a life-filled, flourishing rain forest. Within
forty-eight hours, it would look like a wasteland. Not a thing
lived. - Dave Trotter, veteran (8)

The US military was also exposed to Agent Orange, and after the
war thousands of veterans found they had serious health problems
associated with their exposure. At first the military tried to cover
up the problem - the Air Force published three studies exonerating
Agent Orange. These studies, it was later found, were altered to
remove evidence that children of fliers exposed to Agent Orange
were twice as likely to be born with birth defects and that the
fliers themselves were sicker than controls by a ratio of 5 to 1.
(7)

Now, the US Veterans' Administration, citing numerous studies,
acknowledges that
Agent Orange has been linked to a number of illnesses, including
various cancers, birth defects in the children of exposed veterans,
leukemia and other diseases. The VA administers a program that provides
benefits for veterans with illnesses linked to Agent Orange exposure.

Although the US Government enjoys sovereign immunity and could
not be sued by the veterans, many veterans did sue the companies
that manufactured Agent Orange and kept its toxicity secret. In
1984, Dow and other producers settled for $180 million, and created
a fund that was exhausted by 1994. In 2003, the US
Supreme Court ruled that veterans who became sick after the
fund was exhausted were entitled
to pursue their own lawsuits against the companies that had
produced Agent Orange.

"Larry then was diagnosed as having chronic
pancreatitis. We were told that men who have this disease were usually
in their 50s and usually did not live long because there is no cure,
the pain becomes so severe that most people die from shock. Because
of the hospital stays, Larry could not hold down a job. But in May
1980 he did find a job and held in the pain as much as he could.
At the same time, we noticed that Caroline, our daughter, was not
progressing. After four days of exhaustive tests, all came back
normal except for the fact there was something foreign in her blood.
We were told that she had severe developmental delays.

By January 1981 Larry's health grew worse. His
gall bladder was removed and an exploratory laparotomy was done.
Recovery from this surgery was very slow and never complete. On
the first day back to work, he was told that his insurance had been
canceled. On the following day, he was told that his job had been
filled in his absence and that he was no longer employed. In July
1981 we had to declare bankruptcy because of the medical bills that
had accumulated. That same month Larry checked into Hines Veterans
Hospital because of another pancreatitis flare-up. One of his doctors
did come out and say, "off the record," that a dangerous
level of dioxin had been found in his blood.

Attica Michigan, 2004

"In November 1981 he got a job as a security
officer. He worked until February 1982, when his health grew even
worse. On March 24, he called me at work and asked me to take him
to the hospital. When I reached home, he was doubled over in pain.
By Friday morning, the situation had become critical. He was now
totally on a respirator. I wanted to stay with him, but he told
me to go home and take care of the kids. At 5 P.M. the doctors called
and said they needed consent for emergency surgery. I got to the
hospital just as they were taking Larry down. He was in very critical
condition. About forty-five minutes later, the doctor came to me
and said Larry never made it to surgery. His heart had stopped and
they could not revive him. He was 29 years old."
- Monica Boeke, veteran's widow (9)

Soldiers from other countries also fought in the war, and were
afflicted by Agent Orange. Veterans from Canada, Australia and New
Zealand participated in the lawsuit against Agent Orange manufacturers,
and collected a portion of the settlement, but Vietnam Veterans
from South Korea have not yet received any compensation. During
the course of the war, 320,000 Korean soldiers fought in Vietnam,
sustaining 16,000 injuries and 5,000 deaths. An estimated 100,000
South Korean veterans are
suffering from Agent Orange-related illnesses. In January 2006,
a South Korean court ordered Dow and Monsanto to pay
$62 million in medical compensation to 6,800 people; Dow has
vowed to appeal the decision, and more cases are pending.

Cho Pan-chul, 57,
a South
Korean Kyungnam University graduate, stayed in Vietnam
for 22 months through August 1972. It wasn't until 1974 when
he started feeling sick. Mr. Cho suffered from stomach pains,
gastric ulcers and inflammation of his stomach lining as well
as neuralgia and dental decay. By the time when he was in
his early 40s he had all 32 teeth pulled out.

Skin diseases started occurring for many
soldiers who participated in the war four to five years after
they were in Vietnam, but they only discovered that these
were caused by Agent Orange much later. Mr. Cho also suffered
chronic fatigue and skin conditions such as adult acne, which
grew on his face and back, giving off a watery discharge.
The acne was so serious that he even needed surgery.

Mr. Cho was married in 1977 and had a
daughter a year later, but he lost the next two sons because
both were born without a brain. A gynecologist told him that
the abnormalities were probably caused by mutations in his
sex chromosomes. His third son died of a brain infarction
when he was three. Later Mr. Cho had a second daughter in
1982 and son, who is healthy, in 1989.

Among his many diseases, only three of
have been recognized as caused by Agent Orange: diabetes,
high blood fat and seborrheic dermatitis. In 1999, Mr. Cho
was registered as suffering from what are suspected to be
Agent Orange related symptoms.

Dioxin
is among the most toxic compounds ever studied. Dioxin is
harmful to life in miniscule amounts and has been linked by
experts to endometriosis, immune system impairment, diabetes,
neurotoxicity, birth defects, decreased fertility, testicular
atrophy and reproductive dysfunction, and cancer. Dioxin can
affect insulin, thyroid and steroid hormones, threatening
the development of all human newborns. For more information
about dioxin and Dow's disreputable history with it in Midland,
see the excellent DioxinSpin
website.

Dow’s factories at its global headquarters in Midland, MI,
have contaminated the entire region, including the Tittabawassee
River floodplains, with stratospheric levels of dioxin.

Testing by the state Department of Environmental Quality have found
dioxin levels as high as 100,000 parts per trillion TEQ - more than
a thousand times the state residential cleanup standard of 90 ppt.
(10)

The state has
warned residents to “Avoid allowing children to play in
soils. Wash hands and any other exposed body surfaces after any
soil contact. Do not eat unwashed foods from your garden. Do not
engage in any other activities that may introduce soil into the
mouth. Keep soil moist to control dust. Remove footwear before entering
the house. Store all used gardening clothing outdoors.” (11)

Demanding Dow clean up

The swathe of dioxin contamination extends twenty-two miles downstream
from the Dow plant. Shortly after it first became public, in November
2001, Dow and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality attempted
to work out a sweetheart
deal in which the DEQ would “solve” the problem
by raising the state dioxin cleanup standard tenfold. This attempt
was thwarted by outraged community members, environmentalists, and
the EPA.

Tittabawassee floodplain residents – numbering 179 –
filed a suit seeking
reparations from Dow for jeopardizing their health and devaluing
their property. Although the medical monitoring portion of their
claim was struck down by the Michigan Supreme Court, a Saginaw County
Circuit Court Judge recently ruled that the suit can proceed with
class action status, which could include as many as 2,000
property owners. Although Dow has put away $54 million for the
cleanup, an analysis commissioned by the Ann Arbor-based Ecology
Center in 2004 said costs could
exceed $300 million.

Dow and three other companies continued to produce and export the
extremely hazardous pesticide DBCP, sold under the name of Nemagon
and Fumazone, to developing countries for years after it was banned
in the US in 1979. The US ban occurred after DBCP was linked to
human sterility in California.

The
companies knew since at least the 1960s that the product caused
male sterility in rats, and even
speculated that DBCP could be a male contraceptive. However
they concealed this information. An “internal and confidential”
report on DBCP from the Dow Chemical Company Biochemical Research
Laboratory dated July 23, 1958 reads: “Testicular
atrophy may result from prolonged repeated exposure. A tentative
hygiene standard of 1 part per million is suggested.” However,
Dow did not reduce exposures to the chemical, and neglected to report
findings of reduced sperm and atrophied testicles of rabbits and
monkeys when they submitted information for registration and labeling.
It wasn’t until 1977, when 35 of 114 workers at a DBCP production
plant in California were found to be sterile, that the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) levied strict regulations of the chemical.
One worker in a Dow manufacturing plant said, “After telling
me that I shouldn't worry about anything out there because it can't
hurt me, now to find out that I'm sterile from it, their answer
was, don't worry about that because you can always adopt children.”
(12)

When DBCP was first marketed in developing countries, it had no
labels warning that it was extremely toxic and no instructions on
the use of safety equipment. "We sprayed without any protections,"
says José Antonio Rodríguez Pineda, a banana worker
who was employed at the San Carlos plantation in El Viejo. "We
worked in shorts because it was so muddy, without any protection
on our feet or hands." Francisco Gonzáles believes he
lost his chance to be a father because of the pesticide DBCP. "I
can't have children," says
Gonzáles, who began working in the banana plantations
of Chinandega, Nicaragua, in 1975, when he was 20 years old. "It's
very painful, you know, each one of us would like to have our own
child, a child of our blood. But I was poisoned." In El Viejo
and other villages in Nicaragua's banana-growing province of Chinandega
today, DBCP is called "Death's Dew."

Jose Alberto Paniagua, 24, was
born
disabled and voiceless with a gaze permanently
haunted by a look of terror. Jose’s father and mother
both worked at a plantation which used Nemagon

Widespread use of DBCP on banana plantations around the world has
caused the permanent sterility of thousands of workers. One study
found that approximately 20-25% of the male working population in
banana plantations on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast, where workers
had mixed DBCP by hand, were sterilized. DBCP is also believed to
cause miscarriages, birth defects, liver damage and cancer when
inhaled or absorbed by the skin, and an estimated 22,000
Nicaraguans suffer from Nemagon-caused diseases and disability.
This has created a great deal of liability for the companies responsible
- primarily Dow, Shell, and Dole. In a 1997 settlement, the four
companies that produced the chemical (Dow, Shell, Occidental and
Amvac) agreed to pay $41.5 million to 26,000 banana workers in 11
countries. (13)

However several other lawsuits continue. On December 11, 2002,
a Nicaraguan court concluded that Dow, Shell, and Dole should pay
$489.4 million to 486 banana workers. The companies have refused
to pay and, led by Dole, they counter-sued the claimants for fraud
and
asked for $17 billion in damages.

Altogether the number of pending DBCP-related lawsuits has grown
to 295 in Nicaragua, representing a total of 6,544 plaintiffs
and damages worth more than $11 billion. Similar legal actions have
also been raised in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Guatemala, and
the Philippines, where Dow, Dole and others were named in a $4 billion
DBCP action involving 35,000 individuals, which was thrown out in
2002 on appeal.

Thousands march against Nemagon
and Dow

Dow is trying to kill this burgeoning liability. According to The
New York Times, Dow, Dole, and Shell hired lobbyists to encourage
the Bush administration to help annul Law 364, a Nicaraguan law
that makes it easier for farm workers to sue for DBCP compensation.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was reported to have intervened
with Nicaragua's foreign minister over this issue. Revelations of
this interference in the Nicaraguan press prompted a massive protest
of banana workers--several thousand strong--who marched on the capital
and demanded
that the government resist US pressure. Subsequently both the Nicaraguan
government and the Supreme Court have backed Law 364, leading Dow
and Shell, in January 2004, to ask a federal court in California
to declare future rulings in Nicaraguan courts under the law "unenforceable"
in the United States courts. See this excellent
overview in Corpwatch, and this
article in the Miami Herald.

More recently, in April of 2005, former banana workers in Nicaragua
won the
right to present their case to the United Nations Human Rights
Committee after more than one thousand DBCP victims staged a month-long
protest - including hunger strikes, threats to burn themselves alive,
and the occupation of the Human Rights Ombudsman office - in Managua.

Every person alive today has synthetic chemicals running through
their veins. (14) Many of these chemicals
did not even exist before WW II. A good number have been produced
by Dow. Its
chemicals are collecting in our fatty tissue and confusing our hormone
systems. Much of our food contains pesticide residues. Other chemicals
are sprayed on fields or gardens and enter the air, soil and water.
So chemicals enter our bodies when we eat, breath and drink.

In 2003 the Center for Disease Control (CDC) undertook the most
extensive study to date of pesticides and industrial chemicals
in the bodies of people across the US. The scientists looked for
just 116 of the thousands of chemicals in modern use and they found
all 116 of these chemicals the blood and urine of the random people
they tested. One of these, chlorpyrifos (also known as Dursban),
was found in 93% of the American population, and a 2004 study by
the Pesticide Action Network North America, Chemical
Trespass: Pesticides in Our Bodies and Corporate Accountability,
quantifies this contamination and concludes that Dow is responsible
for 80% of the U.S. population's chlorpyrifos
body burden. It is estimated that there are 700 contaminants in
each of us. (15) Of up to 1.2 billion pounds
of pesticides used each year in the US; no one knows exactly how
many end up in our bodies or what the long term effects of exposure
might be. Virtually nothing is understood of how these chemicals
interact with each other inside our bodies.

Scientists have already discovered that potential harm from exposure
to some individual chemicals ranges from reduced fertility and developmental
damage in our unborn children to neurological disorders and cancers.
Even exposure to miniscule amounts of some chemicals can be harmful,
especially to infants and children whose bodies are developing quickly
and taking in much more food, water, air and chemicals per pound
of body weight than adults. The pesticide residues and other chemicals
are in our food, our cosmetics and our pets' flea collars. They
are in the water we drink and the air we breathe. They are even
present in breast milk and mothers' wombs. (16)

In a July 2005
study spearheaded by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in
collaboration with Commonweal, researchers at two major laboratories
found an average of 200 industrial chemicals and pollutants in umbilical
cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in
U.S. hospitals. Tests revealed a total of 287 chemicals in the group.
The umbilical cord blood of these 10 children, collected by Red
Cross after the cord was cut, harbored pesticides, consumer product
ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage.

After women started complaining about silicone breast implants
leaking their jelly-like goo into their bodies and causing a variety
of health effects, Dow subsidiary Dow Corning employed its time-tested
spiel that the implants
were “100 percent safe.”

However in the 1990s several juries ruled otherwise, deciding that
Dow Chemical and Dow Corning conspired to deceive women with breast
implants about the health effects of silicone products. Although
Dow Chemical maintained that the implants were the sole responsibility
of subsidiary Dow Corning, several juries found Dow Chemical itself
liable. This led to a 1998 settlement in which Dow Corning and Dow
Chemical paid $3.2 billion to cover claims associated with silicon
implants among 170,000 women. (17) The sum
was so large that Dow Corning was forced to file for bankruptcy
protection.

Extolling the virtues of the “back room boys” or the
innovators at Dow, a Vietnam veteran is attributed with this perverse
but technically illuminating quote about the development of Napalm:

"We sure are pleased with those backroom
boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot -- if the gooks
[Vietnamese] were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started
adding polystyrene --- now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But
then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they
started adding Willie Peter (white phosphorus) so's to make it burn
better. It'll burn under water now. And just one drop is enough;
it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway
from phosphorus poisoning."(18)

However Dow's President at the time, Herbert D. Doan, described
Napalm as "a good weapon for saving lives," claiming further
that "It is a strategic weapon essential to the pursuit of
the tactic we are engaged in without exorbitant loss of American
lives." Novelist Robert Crichton, writing in the New York
Review of Books, could have been responding directly to Doan
when he wrote that “the justification for this behavior .
. .lies in the words 'saving American lives.' Any action can be
condoned, any excess tolerated, any injustice justified, if it can
be made to fit this formula. The excessive valuation on American
life, over any other life, accounts for the weapons and tactics
we feel entitled to use."

Chlorpyrifos, marketed by Dow as Dursban, is well known as a home
and garden insect spray; until 2000 it was the most widely used
household pesticide in the US. (19) The
pesticide is also a nerve toxin and suspected endocrine disruptor
with the potential to alter and interfere with the hormonal systems
of insects, wildlife, and people. Since the 1960s, chlorpyrifos
has made thousands of people sick each year in the US. (20)
It causes neurological damage to children and can result in blurred
vision, fatigue, muscle weakness, memory loss and depression. It
has been associated with carcinogenicity, reproductive and developmental
toxicity, and acute toxicity. (21)

In
1995, Dow was fined $732,000 for not sending the EPA reports it
had received on 249 Dursban poisoning incidents. In June 2000, as
a result of pressure from environmental and public health organizations,
including the EPA, Dow withdrew registration of chlorpyrifos for
use in homes and other places where children could be exposed, and
severely restricted its use on crops. The company, however, continues
to market Dursban in industrializing countries, including India,
where Dow's sales literature claimed Dursban has "an established
record of safety regarding humans and pets." (22)
In 2003, tests
conducted by Delhi NGO Centre for Science and Environment for
pesticide residues in Indian cans of Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola revealed
levels of chlorpyrifos exceeding EU drinking water standards.

In 2003, Dow
agreed to pay $2 million - the largest penalty ever in a pesticide
case - to the state of New York, in response to a lawsuit filed
by the Attorney General to end Dow's illegal advertising of Dursban
as "safe".

In 1998, Dow tested
Dursban on 60 paid recruits at a lab in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dow
also fed Dursban to inmates at Clinton Correctional Institute, New
York, in 1972 to assess its effects on humans. (23)

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recently
reported on the testing of 9,282 people nationwide for "body
burdens" of hazardous or dangerous chemicals. The study found
that 93% of the US population has levels of chlorpyrifos metabolites,
or breakdown products, in their bodies. The average tested child
aged 6-11 was found to have exposure to the neurotoxic pesticide
chlorpyrifos at four times the level the US Environmental Protection
Agency considers acceptable for long-term exposure. One market analysis
(Chemical
Trespass: Pesticides in Our Bodies and Corporate Accountability
by the Pesticide Action Network North America) concluded that Dow
Chemical was likely to have contributed at least 80% of the chlorpyrifos
exposure in the United States. Although all residential uses of
chlorpyrifos were phased out beginning in 2000, agricultural and
industrial uses are still allowed.

The Dow Chemical Company puts nearly 8 million people living near
its U.S.
plants at risk for injury or death in the event of an accident
or terrorist attack, according to an
analysis by U.S. PIRG. Dow Chemical had
2,562 accidents between 1990 and 2003, including 85 accidents involving
rail transport. Dow is an industry leader when it comes to accidents,
ranking higher in sheer number than all other members of the American
Chemistry Council since 1990 with the exception of BP. Luckily,
many of these accidents did not result in major fatalities, but
the potential for disaster at a Dow-owned facility remains very
real.

Its emissions are also spectacular: more than 16 million pounds
of hazardous chemicals in 2002, according to the EPA’s Toxics
Release Inventory. This includes many potent carcinogens: in
2000, Dow ranked 6th
in the nation for the release of cancer-causing chemicals, dumping
more than 2 million pounds into the nation's air and water. In the
same year Dow released more dioxin--a spectacularly dangerous and
hazardous chemical--than any other parent company in the nation:
a full 1457 grams.

EPA alleges that Dow violated the Clean Air Act by failing to comply
with national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants. Specifically,
EPA said the company violated testing, operating, monitoring, recordkeeping,
reporting and notification requirements. In addition, EPA alleges
Dow has exceeded emission and other limits. In an unrelated action,
EPA has filed an administrative complaint against Dow for failure
to comply with the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know
Act.

The company has been cited for failure to file the required chemical
release forms for the 2,4-D butoxyethyl ester during calendar years
2000, 2001 and 2002. Dow was also cited for underreporting the volume
of chloromethane and propylene oxide released from the facility
during calendar years 2000, 2001 and 2002.

worst-case scenario

Meanwhile Dow’s accidents and releases have threatened the
lives and health of people throughout the nation. In November, 2001,
a chemical spill in Dow’s Texas City marine facility sent
15 citizens to the hospital, at the same time that the company was
threatening to pull out of the community’s safety program
because it was miffed with the city's political leadership (see
the AFL-CIO
report). Other recent accidents and releases have put Dow's
neighbors in Sarnia,
Canada, Freeport,
Texas, Clute,
Texas, and Midland,
Michigan at risk. And a recent
ranking of the worst air polluters in the nation puts Dow Chemical
in the top ten in terms of the volume of chemicals released, the
relative toxicity of the different chemicals and the number of people
at risk.

As of December 2000, the EPA has named Dow or Union Carbide as
a Potentially Responsible Party (PRP) under federal or state Superfund
laws at a combined 136 hazardous waste sites. (24)
In 2002, Dow Chemical estimated
its Superfund liability
at $394 million. Records from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons
plant in Colorado - which was operated until 1975 by the Dow Chemical
Company - indicate that some workers absorbed so much plutonium
that the chromosomes of their blood cells became deformed; 13 workers
have died of cancer. (25) As of 2000, a
total of 50,000 Coloradoans have joined in a $550 million lawsuit
against Dow and Rockwell International, the other co-operator of
the plant. (26) Attorney Merrill Davidoff,
speaking on behalf of the victims, said that Dow, Rockwell, and
the US Department of Energy still refuse
to account publicly for 2,600 pounds of radioactive plutonium
that went missing from Rocky Flats during the 37 years the plant
made nuclear weapons. "The releases and contamination began
under Dow, continued under Rockwell, persist to the present, and
will continue into the indefinite future, as the result of operational
and waste-storage practices that Dow and Rockwell conducted intentionally,
and which have led and will lead to offsite
releases of plutonium and the contamination of area properties."

In the 1940’s, Union Carbide dumped nearly 50
million gallons of radioactive effluents (equivalent to nearly
13 seconds of full flow over the American side of Niagara Falls)
into the ground at Tonawanda, New York, and from there it drained
into local aquifers and the Niagara River. In the 1960’s and
1970’s they also buried 505
tons of material containing 9,212 pounds of uranium oxide and
1,293 pounds of thorium oxide 20 feet under the earth near Niagara
Falls Boulevard. This material has never been recovered and disposed
of, and no one knows exactly where it is to this day.

According to their
own documents, Dow Chemical and other corporations conspired
since the early 1960’s to conceal the grave danger that vinyl
chloride exposure posed to their own workers. Testing conducted
in 1959 on rats, rabbits, guinea pigs and dogs at Dow Chemical’s
Biochemical Research Laboratory revealed the danger. Adverse effects
on the liver were seen in animals that had inhaled only 100 parts
per million of vinyl chloride, a
fraction of the concentration to which many workers were exposed.
In a letter to the B.F. Goodrich Chemical Co.'s industrial hygiene
director on May 12, 1959, one of the Dow scientists, V.K. Rowe,
outlined the experimental findings and concluded that vinyl chloride
could produce "rather appreciable injury" among workers
routinely exposed to 500 parts per million, then the voluntary standard.
Rowe ended his letter by stating: " ... this opinion is not
ready for dissemination yet and I would appreciate it if you would
hold it in confidence ... "

Rowe's plea for confidentiality was hardly needed. According to
Jim Morris of the Houston
Chronicle, the industry's own documents "depict a framework
of dubious science and painstaking public relations, coordinated
by the industry's main trade association with two dominant themes:
Avoid disclosure and deny liability." The chemical companies
were hiding the fact that they had "subjected at least two
generations of workers to excessive levels of a potent carcinogen
that targets the liver, brain, lungs and blood-forming organs."

And while the documents show that the industry freely shared health
information among themselves, "the companies were evasive with
their own employees and the government," wrote Morris. "They
were unwilling to disrupt the growing market for polyvinyl chloride
(PVC) plastic, used in everything from pipe to garden hoses."
However it wasn't until 2001 that a 90-minute special by PBS and
Bill Moyers, "Trade
Secrets", brought the culpability of the chemical industry
to the attention of the public at large.

"It's all about money," Ray Reynolds, the Vista chairman
of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 4-555, concluded. "All
these years, I believe, they've been killing people, but they've
put a dollar figure on it."

In "Dow's
Union Workers--The Forgotten Stakeholders," the Metal Trades
Department of the AFL-CIO compiles a devastating record of Dow's
union-busting activity over almost half a century. "In the
1960s and early 70s," the report says, "Dow officials
reacted strongly to a series of strikes and began to develop a company-wide
policy to combat union activity through an opportunistic 'divide
and conquer' system that has evolved into what the company today
refers to as its 'Basic Principles of Salaried Operations.' That
policy, which remains largely unchanged today, is designed to induce
workers to dump union representation by dangling a package of 'rewards'
that include pay increases of as little as 40 cents, a strict autocratic
'command and control' management structure and special parking privileges.

"Other recent incidents highlight different dimensions of
the company's crass disregard for workers and citizens. Dow is one
of dozens of Fortune 500 companies routinely purchasing so-called
'dead
peasant' insurance on its workers. In another case, Dow won
a Texas Supreme Court decision that found the company has no legal
duty to assure the job safety of an independent contractor. Dow
also pioneered the tactic of setting up ex-employees in contracting
businesses to provide an alternative workforce, often paying considerably
more to get tasks completed, but creating doubt and uncertainty
among its own personnel about their future job security."

That insecurity seems justified given Dow's current "restructuring"
plan, launched in 2003, which has led to widespread layoffs, pay
cuts, and losses through attrition and plant shutdowns. In April
of 2004, Dow
announced that 3,000 more jobs, or about 7% of its workforce,
would go as the company continued its "restructuring."
These included job losses in Freeport,
Texas and Kanawha
Valley, where one worker, Stanley Stricker, a 30-year employee
at the plant, said "We haven't slept easy since this damn outfit
[Dow] took over. These people sold their souls, they made a deal
with the devil. They're just canning people and saying, 'This is
the way it has to be.'"
Nor are workers in Dow's own hometown of Midland, Michigan, immune
from Dow's crusade against unions and workers. Under a newly-ratified,
eight-year contract, nearly 20 percent of Dow's workers are facing
pay cuts so severe that their families could lose
their middle class status and slip into poverty. "I would
never say this is a good contract," said Kent Holsing, president
of the United Steelworkers Local 12075, which represents 961 employees.
"What I would say is that this is the best possible contract
we could get. It was gut-wrenching." Terri Johnson, the public
affairs leader at Dow's Michigan Operations, expressed things a
different way: "[Dow is] extremely pleased with the outcome
of this vote."

Meanwhile Dow's CEO, William Stavropoulos, must also be pleased.
He was awarded a $2.3 million bonus in 2003, on top of a $1.3 million
base salary and millions more in other incentives and benefits,
according to the company's proxy statement. Kenny Perdue, secretary-treasurer
of the state AFL-CIO, responded
by saying that the bonus “Flies in the face of the workers.
...The workers are out there doing their jobs, trying to keep their
pay and benefits and feed their families and the CEO is awarded
a $2.3 million bonus that in his own mind he believes he’s
worth,” Perdue said. “And all along the company is laying
off workers. Why couldn’t the company use some of this bonus
to keep workers?”

"First, do no harm", the Hippocratic oath taken by nearly
everyone in the medical profession, has never been a mantra at Dow.
Their fervent support for the human testing of their poisonous products--testing
that has no potential
of helping and every probability of harming the health of paid test
subjects--undermines everything that the Hippocratic Oath stands
for. At issue is the safety standard that the US EPA currently employs
to protect us from pesticide exposure: a level of harm is established
for animals, and then that level, divided by a safety factor of
ten, becomes the standard used by the EPA. That factor-of-ten cushion
is a source of irritation to the chemical companies that produce
and market pesticides, including Dow, and they've been pressing
the EPA to recognize the results of human testing--which seem likely
to result in looser
pesticide standards.

It's worth noting that Dow is putting its money where its mouth
is. Dow has conducted at least five human studies with pesticides
since the 1970s (27) - including a 1998
study in Nebraska that recruited college students through an ad
in the school newspaper urging students to "earn
extra money". That they did by calling 402-474-PAYS, signing
a seven-page consent form and popping a pill loaded with the active
ingredient in Raid roach spray, Dursban. Dursban,
a nerve-gas derivative found to cause neurological damage in children,
was withdrawn from household use by the EPA in 1999. Dow AgroSciences
paid
the test subjects $460 each. In 1971, Dow tested chlorpyrifos
on inmates at the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York, (28)
and in 1965, Dow conducted dioxin tests on inmates at the Holmesburg
Prison in Pennsylvania. (29)

Dow and Union Carbide are both (see SHAC
and CARN-AGE)
former customers of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), one of the most
vile and infamous animal testing companies. Huntingdon
has been the target of five undercover investigations, videotapes
from which have exposed HLS staff punching and violently shaking
beagle puppies, performing a dissection of a live monkey, transplanting
a frozen pig's heart into a baboon and breaking numerous animal
welfare laws. These investigations have resulted in the convictions
of HLS employees for animal cruelty, fines by the USDA, and the
near-closure of Huntingdon by the British government (see this
site for more information, and SHAC
for more about the campaign against Huntingdon).

Dow continues to test its chemicals on animals, often in needless
or duplicative tests. In a
letter dated June 25, 2004, the Physicians Committee for Responsible
Medicine, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Humane
Society of the United States, the Doris Day Animal League, and Earth
Island Institute--five organizations with a combined membership
of more than 10 million Americans--all objected to Dow's callous
violation of animal testing protocols. PETA writes
that "Dow has so little regard for the public’s comments
on its test plans that it violated a basic tenet of the HPV [high
production volume, a chemical testing protocol] program and went
ahead with its plans for the proposed
animal tests even before the public-comment period was over! The
agreement, signed by all HPV participants, calls for them to post
their plans for testing on a Web site for 120 days and to consider
all public comments before proceeding. In violation of the HPV animal
welfare agreement, Dow decided to use a test that kills 1,350 animals
to test the chemical 2,3,4,5,6-pentachloropyridine, even though
the company could
easily have used another test that kills half as many animals.
Even the EPA recommended that the alternative test be used. And
even though the public-comment period on this plan expired on August
25, 2003, the study using 1,350 animals was already underway in
early September. In fact, the animals had already been ordered for
the study when Dow submitted its test plan for public comment in
March 2003."

In 1998, Dow announced that it would begin “pursuing long-term,
value-added growth opportunities through biotechnology.” (30)
Today, Dow, led by its subsidiary Dow AgroSciences, is a major player
in agricultural biotechnology. Dow’s patents on plant biotechnology
rank in the top five of all corporations worldwide, (31)
with product lines that include Mycogen Seeds, Phytogen,
Bt corn and Atlas Roundup Ready soybeans. Mycogen, a wholly-owned
subsidiary of Dow, focuses on a number of different crops, including
alfalfa, corn, sorghum, soybean, sunflower, as well as animal feed
crops. Mycogen’s purchase of Illinois Foundation Seeds provided
Dow with about 12 percent of the U.S. corn seed market; the company
also owns Wisconsin-based Agrigenetics and Brazil's Dinamilho Carol
Productos Agricolas, Hibridos Colorado Seed, and FT Biogenetica
de Milho.

In 1998, Dow formed a new company, Advanced Agri-Traits, to coordinate
strategic alliances for the biotech industry. Dow has also formed
many alliances of its own with major biotech players both here and
abroad. Dow’s Mycogen division and DuPont’s Pioneer
Seed division are jointly marketing seed corn varieties with the
B.t. gene under the Herculex label. In 2002, Dow AgroSciences signed
an agreement with Monsanto to allow extensive collaboration in the
field of biotechnology, (32) and Dow/Mycogen
jointly developed herbicide tolerant crops with Rhone Poulenc (now
Bayer). Dow and Performance Plants, a biotech company, have a deal
to develop GE varieties of canola, sunflower, peanuts, cotton, and
silage corn. Dow is also pursuing industrial and pharmaceutical
biotechnology applications. Dow AgroSciences has invested $20 million
in SemBioSys Genetics Inc. for the development of drugs, vaccines,
industrial and feed products from canola. (33)
Dow is also collaborating with San Diego-based EPICyte to produce
human antibodies in genetically engineered plants.

Along with Monsanto and Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences is rushing to
introduce its brand of GM cotton, called “Widestrike,”
into West Africa. With the support of USAID, the three companies
are finalizing plans with the Malian government to convert the West
African country’s cotton —its number-one export crop—to
transgenic varieties over the next five years. Under the terms of
the draft agreement, field tests of imported transgenic Bt cotton
will begin in 2004. The plan is being negotiated without consultation
with Malian cotton farmers, those most at risk from the impending
conversion to GM technology. In the West African context there is
simply no way to guarantee that transgenic cotton, once it is introduced,
will not contaminate the conventional cotton supply. Read more in
Corpwatch.

Recently, Cargill-Dow introduced its NatureWorks line of fleece
that uses genetically-engineered corn as a material replacement
for plastic. Cargill-Dow claims they are attempting to find alternate
sources of non-genetically engineered materials, such as straw.
Until then however, they are already producing even more products
from GE corn, including carpeting, wall panels, upholsty, interior
furnishings, outdoor fabrics, and plastics like those used to wrap
CDs and golf balls. There were also discussions with Bed, Bath &
Beyond to produce a line called “Natural Balance”, which
included pillows, comforters and mattress pads made from this material.
Read more in Corpwatch.

In 2002, Dow AgroSciences was fined $8,800 by the EPA for not isolating
a field trial of insect-resistant corn properly to prevent cross-contamination.
The field trial, which took place in Hawaii, was initially conducted
without the approval of the EPA, because the company felt that it
had met federal regulations. (34) Also in
2002, Dow contributed nearly US $400,000 to the Alliance for Better
Foods’ US $5 million advertising blitz to defeat Oregon’s
Proposition 27, a ballot initiative to label genetically modified
foods. Opponents outspent supporters 61 to 1. (35)

In January 2006, Dow and Monsanto agreed
to share patented technology for developing genetically altered
crops. The deal allows Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences to share patented
genes in different strains of corn, soybeans and cotton.

In the 1930s the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia swallowed up
2000 lives, mostly African-American workers who died of silicosis.
Some were buried in mass graves to try to hide the deaths. It was
Union Carbide's first
experience of mass killing.

The West
Virginia Historical Society Quarterly writes that “The
tunnel was of singular importance to the expanding Union Carbide
and Carbon Corporation, which was developing the technology and
markets for a whole new world of alloyed metals, chemicals and plastics.
...Rumors circulated wildly about the number of men dying. Some
were dumped in the river bed and covered with the tunnel rock. Others
were transported to Nicholas County and buried unceremoniously on
a private farm. Pneumonia was given as the cause of death in most
instances. In May, the Chief of the State Department of Mines began
an investigation of working conditions on the tunnel project. According
to the Fayette Tribune, the investigation was ‘precipitated
by an unusual number of deaths . . . through accidents and disease’
and the death rate was ‘high, especially among colored workers.’"

Union Carbide, operating the Hawk's Nest mine with the same safety
standards that would lead to the Bhopal tragedy decades later, chose
not to issue dust masks or to wet the site to reduce workers' danger
of contracting silicosis. While an estimated two thousand workers
died of the disease, the company suppressed medical information
about the causal relationship between inhaled silica dust and the
illness and paid scientists to downplay the danger. In subsequent
Congressional hearings a Union Carbide contractor bereft of PR packaging
finally told the bald truth, saying "I knew I was going to
kill (the mine workers) but I didn't know it was going to be this
soon."

In an investigation into endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDCs) on
PBS’ Frontline, Dr. Frederick Vom Saal, a scientist and Professor
from the University of Missouri, alleges that Dow
Chemical asked him to withhold the results of a study he conducted
on a chemical known as bisphenol-A. The chemical is produced by
Dow and used in everything from compact discs and eyeglasses, to
milk containers, baby bottles, and dental sealants. In the human
body, Bisphenol-A acts like estradiol—the hormone with the
clearest link to breast cancer, and one that also plays a critical
role in human and animal development. The consequences of this "endocrine
disruption" can be far-reaching, causing problems with reproduction,
development, and behavior in wildlife and humans. In the interview,
Vom Saal said that Dow “essentially asked if there were a
mutually beneficial outcome that we could arrive at where I held
off publishing the information about this chemical until they had
repeated my studies, and after repeating my studies, approval for
publication was received by all the plastic manufacturers.”
More information about the experiments, as well as the industry's
subsequent attempt to undermine Vom Sall's credibility, is available
here.

Dow, Bayer, and GE Plastics are the major producers of this chemical,
which is used in everything from compact discs and eyeglasses to
Nalgene water bottles, toys, pacifiers, baby bottles and teethers.
The chemical is also
used in epoxy resins that coat food cans, bottle tops and water
supply pipes, and as sealants for children's teeth for the prevention
of cavities. In the human body, bisphenol-A acts like estradiol—the
hormone with the clearest link to breast cancer, and one that also
plays a critical role in human and animal development. The consequences
of this "endocrine disruption" can be far-reaching, causing
problems with reproduction, development, and behavior in wildlife
and humans. Although about 2 billion pounds of bisphenol A are produced
yearly in the United States, several studies have suggested that
bisphenol A can leach from products under high heat and alkaline
conditions. This has led to widespread exposure throughout the population,
and at levels that several peer-reviewed studies suggest could be
an issue of concern, particularly for pregnant women and children.
The California legislature has now taken up the issue, and a new
bill, AB319, would prohibit the manufacture or sale of any product
intended for use by a child 3 years of age or younger, if it contains
bisphenol A. If passed, California would be the first state to limit
its use. Read more in this March 31st, 2005 article by the San
Francisco Chronicle, and in Bisphenol
A - A Known Endocrine Disruptor, a report by the World Wildlife
Federation.

During the reign of the apartheid government in South Africa, Dow
continued with business-as-usual, supplying it with herbicidal chemicals
to render the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe infertile.
These actions have led to a $71 million lawsuit, filed in New York,
by farmers who claim that their lands remain infertile. (36)

Separately, in October 2003, a New York lawyer filed a case against
five companies, including Dow and Union Carbide, accusing them of
defrauding South African workers during the Apartheid era. (37)

DDT, a deadly pesticide, is one of the twelve Persistent Organic
Pollutants (POPs) slated
for elimination under the Stockholm Convention. Its use was first
implicated as a cause of egg-shell thinning and human cancer by
Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, but the EPA didn't ban
DDT until 1972. American manufacture of DDT began in 1939, shortly
after its potency as a pesticide was discovered. DDT is an endocrine
disrupter, affects the nervous system and can cause liver damage,
and remains in the environment for long periods of time. (38)
Dow was a major producer of the chemical, which was used widely
and indiscriminately for decades. In the photograph at the right,
taken in 1945, bathers at Jones Beach, New York, race through clouds
of DDT. The sign reads "D.D.T. Powerful insecticide harmless
to humans. Applied by Todd Insect Fog Applicators. Nausau County
Extermination Comm. L.I. State Park Comm." The photo was published
in National Geographic's Swim Suits: 100 Years of Pictures,
April 28, 2003.

In January 2002, Dow settled a case brought against its subsidiary
Union Carbide by workers exposed to asbestos in the workplace. The
case was filed before Dow’s acquisition of Carbide; however,
as Carbide’s
new owner, Dow had to reach a settlement in the case. Additionally,
the company has set
aside $2.2 billion to address future liabilities. Dow also has
claims levied directly against it for personal injury related to
asbestos exposure on various Dow premises. In a recent legal twist,
Kelly-Moore Paint Company, a frequent defendant in asbestos cases,
filed a $6 billion lawsuit against Union Carbide and Dow for allegedly
not telling KM about the risks involved in using asbestos-containing
products. A California company, Hamilton Materials, has also sued
Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, claiming they conspired to hide
the dangers of asbestos supplied to the company for use in its products.
The HM suit asks for $100 million in compensation for personal injury
and wrongful death lawsuits filed against the company due to its
use of a Union Carbide asbestos product called Calidria. More information
about Carbide's mounting asbestos liabilities is available in this
excellent series (one
and two)
by the Los Angeles Times.

Joe Derabrant,
dying from asbestos

How has Dow reacted to all this asbestos liability? By trying
to wriggle out of it, of course. Dow and other corporations
facing massive asbestos liability have been lobbying Congress forcefully
for the last two years to create a national asbestos trust fund
to settle all claims. Although this may sound innocuous, it's actually
a huge giveaway to the corporations currently in the dock over their
asbestos liabilities. Not only would the trust fund erase the Chapter
11 (bankruptcy) proceedings facing any corporation that contributes
to the fund, but the value of those trust fund contributions would
be a lot less than what the companies are expected to pay now. In
fact, the savings amount to about 79 percent according to Public
Citizen, or a total of $20 billion. The companies created the innocuous-sounding
Asbestos Study Group, which spent about $27 million between in 2003
and 2004 to lobby Congress for the liability loophole. (The ASG
refuses to make its membership list public, which doesn't help the
shadiness factor.) Meanwhile, about 10,000 Americans die from asbestos-related
causes every year, according to the Environmental Working Group.

Dow has been a regular supplier to and has profited handsomely
from military contracts since its founding. In WWI, Dow supplied
numerous chemicals for the war effort, including picric acid and
monochlorobenzol, used in making explosives, and gas warfare agents
including phosgene and mustard gas. The Army assigned a unit of
doughboys to Midland to work with Dow chemists to learn how to handle
lethal mustard gas. The unit suffered several casualties and two
fatalities in the process. (39)

In
WWII, Dow also played a key role in supplying phenol for use in
explosives, and incendiary bombs, among other products. Union Carbide
also profited. A few days after August 6 the War Department published
the following Statement of the Secretary of War: “The recent
use of the atomic bomb over Japan, which was today made known by
the President, is the culmination of years of herculean effort on
the part of science and industry working in cooperation with the
military authorities . . . While space does not permit of a complete
listing of the industrial concerns which have contributed so signally
to the success of the project, mention should be made of a few.
The du Pont de Nemours Company designed and constructed the Hanford
installations in Washington and operate them. A special subsidiary
of the M.W. Kellogg Company of New York designed one of the plants
at Clinton, which was constructed by the J.A. Jones Company and
is operated by the Union Carbide and Carbon Company.”

“Does it not seem unfortunate,” Congressman Leavy of
Washington asked in 1942, “that this great nation in its hour
of peril must depend upon a group whose misconduct will have been
officially established in connection with strangling production
by contract agreement with our enemies?” Leavy was talking,
besides a few others, about Dow Chemical and the patent cartel they
had operated in with I G Farben - infamous instrument of Nazi economic
domination - until WWII was underway. Investigations by the Truman
Committee in the early 1940’s discovered that Dow sold magnesium,
a material vital to the war industry, to Nazi Germany for 21 cents
a pound while maintaining a 30-cent price in the US. “Our
own Dow Chemical Company,” said Congressman Rabant in 1942,
“was the sole licensee in this country and agreed to sell
only a small amount to England.” As a result of Dow’s
treachery, by 1940 American output of magnesium was 6,000 tons while
Germany’s was 25,000 tons, giving the Nazi war machine a distinct
advantage in aircraft production.

When the matter came up during the Nuremberg trial of twenty four
I G Farben corporate officers in 1947, Willard H. Dow, then chairman
of the company, apparently said: “We never had any contract
with Farben.” The Nation called Dow’s comment,
in the light of numerous investigations, “an amazing statement”.

The chief suspect at the trial of IG Farben was Otto Ambros, production
chief of I.G. Farben's poison gas facilities. A subsidiary of Farben
manufactured Zyklon B, the poison of Auschwitz, whose chief ingredient
was hydrogen cyanide: the same chemical found
in the bodies of Carbide’s victims in Bhopal (and now
a part of Dow’s
global manufacturing). Ambros was convicted for crimes against
humanity, including slavery and murder, and sentenced to eight years
in prison in a ruling highly significant to the development of international
law for corporate crime. However, Ambros’ reputation as ‘The
Devil’s Chemist’ didn’t make him any less attractive
to Dow upon his release from jail: they were so enamored that they
invited
him to come and work with them in the US.

After the war, Dow was asked to run the Rocky Flats facility in
Colorado, to secretly make plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs.
In the Vietnam War, Dow made napalm and Agent Orange for the war
effort. The legacy of these weapons continues, with Vietnam Veterans
and Vietnamese suffering numerous Agent-Orange-related health effects.

From 1960 until 1987, Dow’s Ivon Watkins (now Dow AgroSciences)
plant, located next to the New Plymouth suburb of Paritutu, manufactured
nearly 500,000 gallons of Agent Orange, mostly for use by the U.S.
during the Vietnam War. Recently, an anonymous executive from the
Ivon Watkins facility went on record to say that Dow owned a large
piece of land near the plant known as the Experimental Farm. It
was there that, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “we bulldozed
pits and dumped thousands of tonnes of chemicals." Residents
nearby the plant have claimed for years that the plant's emissions
caused birth defects, cancer and other diseases, and recently
they've begun to organize under the banner of the Paritutu Dioxins
Investigation Network to demand a health study and cleanup.

Former midwife Hyacinth Henderson, aged 87, says she saw many birth
defects when she worked at New Plymouth's Westown Maternity Hospital.
Between 1965 and 1971 she recorded
167 birth defects out of 5392 babies born there. She told the Herald
that they had abnormalities she had never seen before and she had
been in obstetrics for 40 years. "Some of them were horrific
... There were two anecephalics, which means there is no brain or
the brain is sheared off above the eyebrows. There were a large
number of bone deformities such as clubbed feet and things like
that."

Thanks partly to citizen pressure, a blood study of 24 New Plymouth/Paritutu
volunteers was begun by the Ministry of Health in March of 2004.
The results, released on Sept. 9th of 2004, confirmed
that Dow is one of the largest historical polluters in New Zealand.
According to the
study, the dioxin levels detected in Paritutu residents are
up to fivefold New Zealand's nation-wide levels, which are themselves
second only to South Vietnam.

In what has been described by residents as the "second Vietnam,"
Dow now faces massive future liabilities. "The time has come
for the company to deal with the demons of its past" the New
Zealand Herald writes in an
editorial on the issue, labeling Dow's ethical standards as
"lamentable". Andrew Gibbs of the Paritutu Dioxin Investigation
Network put things a different way: "What we are dealing with
is New Zealand's Chernobyl."

The town of Plaquemine, on the banks of the Mississippi just south
of Baton Rouge, is dominated by the web of chemical tanks and pipes
that lace Dow Chemical’s nearby vinyl chloride monomer (VCM)
factory.

In March 2001, residents of Myrtle Grove trailer park in Plaquemine,
LA received notice that their drinking water was contaminated with
vinyl chloride. The pollution occurred sometime between 1994 and
September 1997. Tests in 1997 showed that vinyl chloride, a chemical
used to make PVC, exceeded safe drinking water standards by two
to three times. In 1998 tests showed levels six to seven times higher
than the standard for human use and consumption. In both instances,
no one was notified. Only after a test conducted in March of 2001
showed elevated levels of vinyl chloride in nine out of twelve wells,
did the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DDH) finally
notify Myrtle Grove residents and facilitate their switch to Plaquemine
city water. Prior to March 2001, as many as 2,000 residents and
visitors drank, cooked with and bathed in the contaminated water.
Questions remain as to whether or not the DDH or Dow withheld information
about the water contamination from residents or regulatory officials.
In June of 2002 a former Dow supervisor, Glynn Smith, told a local
Plaquemine television station that he had instructed employees to
clean railway cars used to transport vinyl chloride and other chemicals
by filling them with water and dumping the resultant mix on the
ground. (40)

In October of 2004, the US EPA released a report that pointed to
Dow as the likely source of groundwater contamination, an assertion
the company continues to hotly refute. According to the Associated
Press, "The EPA report sidestepped directly blaming Dow
for the contamination, saying instead that chemicals got into the
ground in the area around the plant, which includes the company's
landfill. 'We can locate the source of contamination to a geographic
area - that is what we can confidently do,' said Cynthia Fanning,
an EPA spokeswoman. 'And that geographic area is owned by Dow Chemical,
but not entirely.'"

Vinyl chloride has been associated with increased risk of cancer
of liver, brain, lung and digestive tract. On January 8, 2002, current
and former residents of Myrtle Grove filed class-action suit against
Dow in 18th Judicial District Court in Louisiana alleging that the
company knew and covered up information about vinyl chloride contamination
in their community. Dow has denied that the VCM in the groundwater
is from its factory. Meanwhile, residents of the trailer park were
“coerced”
into leaving their homes.

"The Union Carbide, Seadrift, Texas plant
was built in 1954. It operates alongside of sensitive wetlands and
a bay system that provides a livelihood to the many fishermen that
live in Seadrift. 5 to 10 million gallons a day of wastewater is
dumped into the barge canal that opens into San Antonio Bay. Their
wastewater treatment system lies open and alongside the barge channel
and for many years the county's drinking water ran through Union
Carbide/Dow's Burning pits, spill areas, and fields contaminated
with over 19 constituents (benzene, napththalene, toluene, etc)
some with concentrations as high as 2300 ppm. Plant wide, Union
Carbide/Dow had
over 50 areas contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen and
linked to Leukemia. In 1991, after a permit battle over a landfill
and the drinking water, Union Carbide rerouted the drinking water,
saying it was changing the route due to 'water hyacinth that clogged
the bayou.'

"Calhoun County area bays (Lavaca, Matagorda,
and San Antonio Bay) have witnessed the largest dolphin die-offs
in the Mammal Stranding Network's history. In a few short months
over 200 died. The area bays have also witnessed green, brown, and
red tides that kill the fish and at times are toxic to humans.

"On March 12, 1991, an explosion and fire
at the Union Carbide plant killed one worker, injured 32 others
and came within minutes of killing hundreds. A leaked OSHA document
revealed that Union Carbide's EHS (Environmental, Health, and Safety)
staff had conducted 7 audits over a period of twenty years, at least
3 of which warned explicity of the dangers which contributed to
the disaster. Four of the audits were conducted after the Bhopal
disaster and after Union Carbide pushed the Chemical Manufacturer's
Associate to create the Responsible Care Program of self-regulation.
And yet, UCC failed to act on their own EHS staffs recommendations
or in accordance with its own Responsible Care rhetoric.

"In 1991, a retired superintendent of the
UCC plant came with a map showing the C- Dripolene Decant Basin
(benzene waste). He said his grandson was mentally retarded and
he could no longer live with the truth of what UCC had did. He said
at the Basin and near the county's drinking water source (Goff Bayou)
there was a tank that leaked. The company knew that if they dumped
the C-Dripolene in the tank it would leak out and then they could
put more waste in the tank. It was a convenient and inexpensive
way to get rid of benzene waste. This went on for years until UCC
got afraid someone had found out and they suddenly went in and tried
to clean up the mess. A bulldozer was nearly lost in the cleanup
and much of the contamination bulldozed fell into the drinking water.”
- Diane
Wilson, mother of five, fourth-generation fisherwoman, environmental
activist.

According to a 2002 class action lawsuit, Dow Chemical took out
secret life insurance policies on 21,000 of its workers, keeping
the proceeds when they died. In many states, taking out such policies
are illegal, including Texas, where Dolores Baker claims Dow had
a such a policy on her husband - a security supervisor who retired
from Dow's plant in Freeport in 1993 and died in 1999.

When the beneficiary doesn't have a legitimate interest, the insurance
proceeds revert back to the employee's estate under Texas law, and
the relatives of former Dow employees are suing Dow for the benefits.
Leslie Hatfield, a Dow spokeswoman, said in the
Houston Chronicle that the policies were purchased only on those
employees who consented.

Michael Myers, with the law firm of McClanahan & Clearman in
Houston, said that if the company paid $10,000 a year in premiums,
the benefits to covered employees could be worth as much as $300,000
each.

On the night of October 16, 2000, Union Carbide's binding gum-producing
factory discharged chemicals, including poisonous ethyl acrylate,
into an open drain in a heavily-populated suburb of Colombo, Sri
Lanka, seriously harming at least 100 people, including 25 children.
More than 1,000
people sought medical treatment. The discharge immediately sparked
angry protests because residents have complained for five years
about the dangerous pollution in Ekala, about 25 kilometres north
of Colombo city.

The leak affected
the water and air over a two-square kilometre area. Residents
suddenly suffered sore eyes, headache, vomiting, breathing problems,
choking and rising temperatures. Children were taken to nearby hospitals,
with some serious cases transferred to Colombo's national hospital
the next day. More than 500 people gathered outside the factory
during the night and demanded its immediate closure. Security officers
admitted that the company, a subsidiary of the US multinational,
had released contaminated water into the drain but claimed that
the incident had ended. They refused to allow residents into the
plant to see for themselves. However, the protest forced the local
council to order the plant's temporary closure. When the affected
residents met the next morning at a small hall to discuss further
steps, a leading local politician from the Peoples Alliance government
led a mob assault on them. A gang of about 15 attacked the meeting
with leather belts, batons and bottles. Those who fled were attacked
with stones and some suffered leg injuries as they had tried to
scale walls to escape.

Dow is no stranger to using money to get what it wants. Frank Popoff
summed up Dow’s philosophy on influence-peddling at the 1998
Annual Meeting when he said, “This is a nation born over 200
years ago. It only works when
business dialogues with government.”

Dow’s idea of a dialogue appears
to be money changing hands. Dow and its subsidiaries manage
a massive full- and part-time lobbying force. From 1998 to 2002,
Dow spent $12,210,000 on Washington lobbying - an average of more
than $2.4 million per year. (41) According
to federal lobbying reports, in 1997 Dow spent over $2.1 million
lobbying on issues as disparate as Most Favored Nation status for
China, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Alaskan Wetlands.

To further confuse the public, Dow hides behind seemingly innocuous—but
powerful—trade associations, easily covering up the trail
of money that leads from corporation to legislation. Many of these
associations have their own lobbyists that influence state, federal
and international policies. The Chemical Manufacturers Association
alone (now called the "American Chemistry Council") had
37 federal lobbyists in 1997 and spent over $2.7 million in the
first half of the year lobbying on climate change, children’s
health, tort reform, China’s trade status, Superfund, taxes,
FDA reform, the Safe Drinking Water Act, wetlands, and labor issues.
In this way, Dow safeguards its public image while undermining policies
that prioritize public health and safety over the corporate bottom
line.

At times, Dow’s behavior has been criminal. On February 13,
2007, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Dow
would pay a $325,000 civil penalty to settle charges that its subsidiary
made improper
payments to Indian government officials who held sway over regulatory
approvals for the company's pesticides.

Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Michigan, also agreed to cease
and desist from future violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices
Act. It settled with the SEC without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The nastiness and cruelty of Dow’s attacks on its critics
has often been breathtaking. In 1985, in one of its harshest attacks,
Dow once famously
tried to discredit Melissa Ortquist, a Greenpeace activist who
had plugged Dow's chemical outflow pipes at the company's Midland,
MI headquarters. After her arrest for trespass, city police illegally
sampled her blood and tested it for venereal disease. When the test
came back positive - in error, as it later turned out - Dow, which
had somehow obtained the results, gleefully
publicized them. Aside from exposing a vile streak in Dow's
mentality, the incident raised a disturbing question: if Dow could
get past privacy laws to see those test results from the Midland
health department, did that mean the company could see - and possibly
edit - county health statistics? Letters asking that question began
to appear in the Midland Daily News (along with a full-page apology
to Ortquist from the Dow Chairman, apologizing for the company's
"serious error of judgment").

More recently, in 2004, Dow led twenty of the biggest chemical
companies in the United States in an effort to discredit two historians
who studied the industry's decision to conceal links between their
products and cancer. In
an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich,
Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five
academics who recommended that the University of California Press
publish the book
Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution
by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited
their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged
in unethical conduct. Markowitz is a professor of history at the
CUNY Grad Center; Rosner is a professor of history and public health
at Columbia University and director of the Center for the History
and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia's School of Public Health.
The reasons for the companies' actions are not hard to find: they
face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco
litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer
products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers
of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because
when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript
readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are
highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to
information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.

According to a 2004 report by Rep. Henry Waxman, The
Chemical Industry, the Bush Administration, and European Efforts
to Regulate Chemicals, Dow and other chemical companies
successfully pressured the Bush Administration to lobby against
the European Union’s new chemicals policy, REACH (Registration,
Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals). REACH would require
stricter management of chemicals depending on their risk and require
companies to provide scientific data on the intrinsic properties
and hazards of each substance. The European Commission estimates
REACH could prevent between 2,200 to 4,300 occupational cancer cases
per year. Health benefits of REACH could be up to $61 billion over
a 30-year period.

Twenty years after the Union Carbide uranium mill in Uravan, Colorado,
closed in 1984, a group of 82 former Uravan residents and descendants
of company employees is suing the company, blaming it for a variety
of suspected mining- and milling-related illnesses and genetic disorders.
The lawsuit charges that Union Carbide dumped liquid uranium wastes
directly into the San Miguel River from 1936 to the mid-1950s. The
company began putting liquid and solid wastes into containment ponds
in the mid-1950s, the suit said, but those ponds were unlined -
meaning the wastes could seep down into the soil and contaminate
groundwater. Because Union Carbide didn't supply water for Long
Park, a mining camp of tents and shacks, its residents
often drank water from the uranium mines, the suit said. The
suit also alleges that Union Carbide permitted employees to leave
its mines and the mill without showering or changing clothes. Workers'
clothes were covered in uranium dust and were washed along with
the family's clothing.

In 1978, at Union Carbide's Cimanggis plant in Indonesia, 402
employees (more than half the work force of 750) were found to be
suffering from kidney diseases attributable to mercury poisoning.
The company's doctor Dr. Maizar Syafei reported that she was asked
by the company not to tell the workers that there was mercury in
their drinking water or else the workers "would become anxious."

Clopyralid, an herbicide manufactured by Dow AgroSciences and sold
under the names of 'Confront' and 'Stinger' is so toxic to some
plants that it can harm them at concentrations as low as 1 part
per billion. Commonly used
on lawns to kill weeds such as clover, thistle, dandelions, knapweed
and hawkweed, clopyralid usually remains in yard clippings, and
when these are composted, the soil that comes out
is contaminated. This has caused innumerable problems for organic
farmers, small farmers, and anyone who relies on natural compost
to fertilize their crops. Instead of fertilizing crops, compost
contaminated with clopyralid kills them, particularly sensitive
crops such as peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes and sunflowers. Clopyralid
has been found at harmful levels in commercial and municipal compost
in Washington, California, Pennsylvania and New Zealand; (42)
in response to growing pressure from composters and organic farmers,
Dow withdrew clopyralid from use on residential lawns in the U.S.
in 2002, although this use may persist). (43)
For more information on the magnitude of the problem, see the GRRN
network.

In addition to those mentioned above, Dow manufactures a wide range
of chemicals with dangerous environmental and human health effects,
including 2,4-D (one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange and
Agent White; a possible carcinogen, suspected endocrine disruptor
and potential ground water contaminant); (44)
2,4,5-T (the other active ingredient of Agent Orange; a carcinogen
and suspected endocrine disruptor; in 1977, a lawsuit and subsequent
scientific studies linked 2,4,5-T crop spraying to miscarriages
in Oregon); (45) Ethylene Dibromide, or
EDB (a carcinogen, ground water contaminant, developmental/reproductive
toxin and suspected endocrine
disruptor that was used as a nematicide, rodenticide and insecticide
until it was banned in the U.S. in 1983); (46)
Haloxyfop (a probable human carcinogen that is not registered in
the United States, but is sold throughout the world as Gallant and
Verdict; (47) one of many “circle
of poison” pesticides that can be manufactured in the U.S.,
applied abroad and returned as residue on imported foods); (48)
Nuarimol (a fungicide that causes cancer and birth defects in animals;
(49) although it is not registered in the
U.S. it is sold in Africa, Colombia, Honduras and Europe); (50)
Oxyfluorfen (an herbicide classified by the EPA a possible human
carcinogen); (51) Picloram (an herbicide
chemically similar to clopyralid, which poses a threat to composters
(52) and contains the contaminant hexachlorobenzene
(HCB), a probable human carcinogen; (53)
it was also one of two active ingredients in Agent White and is
a potential ground water contaminant); Telone (a soil fumigant,
carcinogen, and ground water contaminant; one of its active ingredients,
1,3-dichloropropene, produces cancer and birth defects in test animals);
(54) Strongarm (an herbicide that harmed
peanut crops, prompting Texas farmers to sue in a case that went
all the way to the Supreme Court); and Sulfuryl fluoride, or
Vikane (a fumigant used to kill termites and other pests that has
been restricted for extreme acute toxicity). (55)

2,4,5-T Poisons Globe, Arizona
In 1970, miscarriages and illnesses,
linked to the spraying of Dow’s pesticide 2,4,5-T (half
of Agent Orange) by the Forest Service in Globe, Arizona, resulted
in a court case between Dow and the local community. Though Dow
knew about the dangerous effects of this herbicide, it first refused
to accept liability and finally settled in 1980. The same situation
arose in the Alsea Valley in Oregon, prompting the Environmental
Protection Agency to ban 2,4,5-T. Dow unsuccessfully sued the EPA
to repeal the ban and dropped the case in 1983.

Hemlock, Michigan“Everyone remembers the goose. Publications ranging
from prestigious to prurient lavished coverage on a Hemlock-area
honker
with its wings on backward. The town of Hemlock, Michigan -
named after a long-gone canopy of evergreen trees - quickly became
the dateline in macabre reports of fouled fowl, cows with purple
teeth, green-gutted rabbits and wilted houseplants. Less tabloid-worthy
yet worrisome human symptoms also plagued residents southeast of
the village, who by 1977 feared Dow Chemical Co.'s deep brine disposal
had contaminated their drinking water. This 25-year-old story, which
bubbled up in 1978, stands out as a chemical mystery by sparking
a far-flung pollution probe that left residents with no easy answers.
‘You had to keep the focus, and I couldn't spend my whole
life doing this,’ says Carol Jean Kruger, now 68, who spent
years seeking information.”

PERC
Along with other companies, Dow is a major producer of the dry-cleaning
chemical polychlorethylene, or PERC. And along with other companies,
Dow is being held liable for groundwater contamination caused by
the chemical.

On June 9, 2006, a San Francisco jury imposed punitive damages
of $100 million against Vulcan Materials Co. and $75 million against
Dow Chemical Co. in a lawsuit brought by the city of Modesto, Calif.,
over groundwater contamination. $3.17 million was awarded in compensatory
damages.

Dow responded by calling
the members of the jury stupid: "Dow will vigorously challenge
this baseless jury verdict and if necessary in the appellate courts,"
said Dow Chemical spokesman Scot Wheeler. "The jury's verdict,
particularly with respect to punitive damages, is clearly erroneous."

Semiconductor chemicals
Union Carbide has been a major supplier to the semiconductor industry
which uses its chemicals in the manufacturing of silicon chips for
computer devices. Workers are claiming their exposure to hazardous
substances is linked to a variety of cancers, miscarriages, and
birth defects. Union Carbide, IBM and National Semiconductor have
all been named in lawsuits.

Exporting Unregistered Pesticides to Africa, Latin America
In 1990, Dow's joint venture with Eli Lilly, DowElanco, exported
two pesticides from the United States which were not registered
by the EPA. The EPA refused to register DowElanco's herbicide haloxyfop,
marketed under the names "Gallant" and "Verdict,"
and has classified it as a "probable human carcinogen."
According to a July 1990 Greenpeace report, "Never-Registered
Pesticides," DowElanco nevertheless exported haloxyfop for
sale in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. The EPA refused
to set a permissible residue standard (known as food residue tolerances)
for both haloxyfop and nuarimol - another DowElanco product sold
under the trade names "Gauntlet" and "Tridal"
- because it causes cancer and birth defects in laboratory animals.
Nevertheless, DowElanco
continued to export nuarimol for use in Africa, Colombia and
Honduras and Europe.

Climate Change
As a former member of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), Dow opposed
restrictions on the greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global
warming and climate change, and tried to obscure scientific evidence
provided by 2,500 of the world’s leading climate change scientists
that global worming is a reality. Dow's interest in undermining
climate change science is clear: it produces chlorine which is used
in the manufacture of greenhouse gases like hydrofluorocarbons and
halocarbons, and manufactures feedstocks and chemicals used by oil,
gas and auto industries—industries that contribute to climate
change.

PVC: The Poison Plastic
PVC, or vinyl, produces
dioxin throughout its lifecycle and is thought to be a larger
source of dioxin formation than any other single material. Dow is
the world’s largest producer of materials that are used to
produce PVC (chlorine, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride monomer).
Dow’s total vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) production capacity
globally is approximately 2.5 million metric tons per year.

Chlorinated Solvents and Dioxin
Dow is the largest
producer of chlorinated solvents, which are used for cleaning
and coating in industries ranging from automobile manufacturing
to dry cleaning. As with PVC, chlorinated solvents produce dioxin
at multiple points throughout their life cycles.

Price Fixing
Dow, along with other chemical giants including DuPont and Bayer,
engaged in a price-fixing
conspiracy to set prices in a half-dozen chemicals, according
to U.S. and European investigators and the DowJones news service.
The chemicals were used in plastics, rubber, and synthetic materials
in industries as wide-ranging as automobiles, furniture, and flooring.
Among the deals discovered was a conspiracy to hike the price of
neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in auto manufacture and in electronics,
and the widely-used plastic urethane. Another area was in the pricing
of EPDM, a synthetic rubber. In that case, competitors kept factories
running well below capacity and hiked the price based on an artificial
shortage. At least four grand-jury investigations stemming from
the investigations currently are underway in San Francisco. In May,
purchasers of neoprene filed suit against Dow and DuPont, which
had formed a joint venture to produce and sell the synthetic material.
The purchasers claimed the two companies met secretly with global
rivals to fix prices and divide the sales of neoprene. It wasn't
long before DuPont Dow Elastomers agreed
to settle, in June, for $36 million, but other cases are still
ongoing. According to the Baltimore
Sun, DuPont Dow Elastomers LLC, a joint venture of DuPont Co.
and Dow Chemical Co., agreed in January 2005 to pay an $84 million
criminal fine and plead guilty to price fixing.

Poisoning the Public
Dow is profiting from a decision by the US Forest Service to pursue
an extensive herbicide program surrounding Missoula, Montana, using
several Dow pesticides that have multiple documented health effects.
This USFS decision was made in the face of significant public opposition
to the spraying, but was made in close consultation with Dow AgroSciences.
Read more in Montana's
War on Weeds, a report by Beyond Pesticides.

A 2004 report by the investment analysis firm
Innovest, Dow
Chemical: Risks for Investors, examines the financial implications
that all these liabilities hold for the company. For more information,
see the Dow
Corporate Profile assembled by the Pesticide Action Network
North America.

This Canadian radio series (one/two/three)
explores much of Dow’s toxic legacy, its history of corruption,
and disdain for human life. Highly recommended.

The international student campaign to hold Dow
accountable for Bhopal, and its other toxic legacies around the world.
For more information about the campaign, or for problems regarding this
website, contact Shana Ortman, the US Coordinator for the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.
Last updated:
November 12, 2008

WE
ALL LIVE IN
BHOPAL

"The year 2003 was a special
year in the history of the campaign for justice in Bhopal. It was the
year when student and youth supporters from at least 30 campuses in the
US and India took action against Dow Chemical or in support of the demands
of the Bhopal survivors. As we enter the 20th year of the unfolding Bhopal
disaster, we can, with your support, convey to Dow Chemical that the fight
for justice in Bhopal is getting stronger and will continue till justice
is done. We look forward to your continued support and good wishes, and
hope that our joint struggle will pave the way for a just world free of
the abuse of corporate power."